Gary Lamphier: Dismiss Trump if you want, but voter anger in the U.S. is real

Like most of the talking heads on CNN, you may see Trump as a racist, a misogynist, or a reality TV buffoon. But the anger that fuels his campaign is undeniably real. It's rooted in America's current economic malaise, as well as voters' fear of the future.

Hope and change. That was the upbeat rallying cry that carried U.S. President Barack Obama to victory in 2008.

Today, Obama’s slogan sounds almost childishly naive. With less than four weeks to go before Americans elect their next president, the mood south of the border has turned dark, angry, bitter and cynical.

Many of us outside the U.S. are cringing at what has become of the world’s most powerful democracy. What passes for political discourse has morphed into a nonstop shouting match between the two major parties, their candidates and their respective media echo chambers.

As a former provincial court judge put it to me recently: “American voters will have to choose between a con man and a liar.” No wonder most Americans say their country is going in the wrong direction. For them, the Nov. 8 election is shaping up as a lose-lose deal, no matter who wins.

There are lots of reasons for voters’ anger: endless political gridlock in Washington, nonstop wars in the Middle East, the fear of homegrown terrorism, growing income disparity, worries over the $20-trillion-US national debt, and a sense that the social contract that once bound Americans is long gone, replaced by a culture of corruption and greed.

But it’s the loss of the American Dream itself that has propelled Donald Trump’s unlikely campaign to win the White House. Like most of the talking heads on CNN, you may see Trump as a racist, a misogynist or a reality TV buffoon. But the anger that fuels his campaign is undeniably real. It’s rooted in America’s current economic malaise, as well as voters’ fear of the future.

Sure, the U.S. jobless rate has tumbled to the lowest level in eight long years, as Obama often brags. But wage growth has been stagnant for decades, and few solid middle-class jobs have been created. Companies are buying back their shares rather than invest in new plants and equipment.

That’s great for shareholders, but lousy for workers. Economic growth remains stuck in first gear, despite years of rock-bottom interest rates and massive government stimulus programs.

Yes, U.S. stock market indexes have hit one record high after another. But only half of all Americans own any stocks, and those who do have been whacked by two market crashes over the past 16 years. Few have gotten rich in the process, which explains why many Americans are still working past age 65.

Besides, many investors believe the stock market is rigged, that fraudsters on Wall Street go unpunished, and that the rich and powerful play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. That’s what millions of Bernie Sanders supporters believe, and he gave Hillary Clinton a real run for the Democratic Party nomination.

Sanders and Trump have little in common politically, but their simultaneous ascent is no fluke. It’s a sign of widespread anger, fear and alienation in what the coastal elites refer to as “flyover country.”

On the housing front, the U.S. market has also recovered nicely since the deep dark days of the Great Recession, when entire neighbourhoods in major cities were riddled with foreclosure signs. Average prices in the U.S. are back to 2006 levels, before the market crashed.

But after factoring in inflation, prices are still 20 per cent below those of a decade ago. No wonder so many Americans wonder how they’ll manage to pay the bills once they retire.

Concern over the loss of good middle-class jobs has focused mainly on traditional sectors like manufacturing, and for good reason. Millions of U.S. factory jobs have moved to Mexico, China or Southeast Asia over the past 15 years, and many will never return.

That’s also true here in Canada, although Alberta’s energy boom helped to offset the downturn in Ontario’s manufacturing sector, at least until oil prices tanked in 2014.

But the vaunted U.S. tech sector has also failed to deliver many good new middle-class jobs. After growing steadily throughout the 1990s, total employment at U.S. computer and electronics firms in the U.S. has been in retreat for the past 15 years, as manufacturing shifted outside the country.

It stood at just 1.03 million in August, down from 1.87 million in 2001, or a decline of 45 per cent, The Wall Street Journal reports. Employment at semiconductor makers fell by half to 359,000 in the same period.

While there has been job growth in other high-tech sectors such as software publishing, it hasn’t offset the losses in tech manufacturing, the Journal notes. What’s more, today’s successful tech players often have few employees. Instagram had just 13 employees when it was acquired by Facebook in 2012, the Journal notes.

Meanwhile, the number of new tech startups has also shrunk, hampering job creation. According to a 2014 study cited by the Journal, the number of U.S. tech startups peaked at 113,000 in 2001, up more than 75 per cent over the previous decade. But it fell below 80,000 by 2011, and hasn’t recovered since then.

In the late 1990s, then president Bill Clinton waxed poetic about the growth of the U.S. tech sector, and the promise of millions of new knowledge industry jobs to come. Today, Hillary Clinton and her backers like to talk about the promise of the cleantech sector, as the world moves away from fossil fuels.

It’s a nice dream, really. But it seems the folks on Main Street aren’t in the mood to dream anymore. They’re wide awake, and they’re damn mad.

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Gary Lamphier: Dismiss Trump if you want, but voter anger in the U.S. is real